Fiction and the Immigrant Experience

Provided for his students by Professor John Lye

This has been a century of enormous movement of peoples to other countries, largely in search of better economic conditions and more hope. The immigrant experience is widespread, and requires understanding, as people struggle to maintain their sense of themselves and their values while adapting to new cultural environments. "The history of immigration," writes one writer, Oscar Handlin, "is the history of alienation and its consequences....For every freedom won, a tradition lost. For every second generation assimilated, a first generation in one way or another spurned. For the gains of goods and services, an identity lost, and uncertainty found."1.

Thus imaginative writing regarding this experience may, despite different cultural traditions, be placed in a single category as the writers "share a common experience: the experience of growing up in an immigrant family in an alien, often hostile, country."2 The lives of immigrants and their children, and the texts that examine and illumine them, have certain shared themes and patterns.

Common themes:

• failed quests and thwarted dreams;

• nostalgia for a home that now exists only in memory;

• conditions of dislocation and isolation;

• the loss of a supportive community and often unsuccessful attempts to forge new support systems;

• a crippling loss of a relatively coherent earlier identity;

• painful searches for an orderly sense of self and for a healing awareness of personal and cultural wholeness

• intergenerational conflict, as children grow up assimilated into the new culture and reject, in anger, frustration, embarrassment and humiliation, the attempts by their parents to preserve connection to them through common cultural practices and assumptions; the children want independence, but also want identity, and attempt to integrate their cultural background on their own terms, often with great difficulty. The difficulty is especially acute in case of visible difference from the adopted culture.

• marital conflict, as spouses differently adapt to the new or imagined standards of the new culture, and as spouses attempt to assert their identity by acts harmful to the relationship

• foolish or harmful misunderstandings and misreadings of the new cultural environment

• the experience of racism, with its accompanying senses of rejection and humiliation

• attempts to invoke, through memory and story, the sustaining myths and symbols of the past.

Post-colonial concepts such as mimicry, hybridity, the Other and of course identity are all relevant to immigrant experience. Notions more specific to immigrant experience are:

• assimilation or acculturation, the taking to oneself of the adopted culture, of "fitting in";

• cultural or imaginative schizophrenia, in this sense, a state of divided identity - divided by culture, history, circumstance. Novelist Nayantara Sahgal 3 writes, "I am thinking of schizophrenia as a state of mind and feeling that is firmly rooted in a particular subsoil, but above ground has a more fluid identity that doesn't fit comfortably into any single mould."

• double consciousness, a term coined by the black American W.E. Dubois to refer to the "sense of always looking at one' s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

• negotiation, in which the self in a move something like hybridization integrates patterns of behaviour and belief from two cultures, in a sense 'making up' a blended culture which makes sense, accepting what is possible of the new but at times under the signs or in the patterns or tracks of the old.

• the use of irony. As Bharati Mukherjee writes of the irony of writers like V.S. Naipaul, "Irony promised both detachment from, and superiority over, those well-bred post-colonials much like myself, adrift in the new world, wondering if they ever would belong."4

• the use of nationality as metaphor. Mukherjee writes, "instead of seeing my Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or worse, a 'visible' disfigurement to be hidden [her Canadian experience]), I see it now as a set of fluid identities to be celebrated. I see myself as an American writer in the tradition of other American writers whose parents or grandparents had passed through Ellis Island. Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world." Emmanuel Nelson objects to Mukherjee's use of indianness as a metaphor: of the authors of his study he writes, "Their artistic visions are shaped primarily by the values embedded in the twentieth-century bourgeois literature of the West; indeed both writers share with their Western counterparts an obsessive preoccupation with the modern maladies of exile, loneliness, and disorientation." This is an interesting observation: that the plight of the immigrant, and the twenthieth-century sense of dislocation and loss in a world without ontological ground, are very similar -- however the twentieth-century themes do not stress family, community and culture as the immigrant themes do.
  

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Notes

1. Quoted in Thomas Wheeler, The Immigrant Experience. Baltimore, MD. Penguin, 1971.

2. Emmanuel S. Nelson, "Troubled Journeys: Indian Immigrant Experience in Kamala Markandaya's Nowhere Man and Bharati Mukherjee's Darkness" in Anne Rutherford, ed.,From Commonwealth to Post-Colonia. Sidney, NSW, Australia. Dangeroo Press, 1992.

3. "The Schizophrenic Imagination" in Rutherford, From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial.

4. Mukherjee quotes are from the "Introduction" to Darkness.